XCOM: Enemy Unknown – The Strain of Command

If, like me, your only experience with the X-COM series was anecdotal stories from your friends about how fun it was, and how it featured brutal consequences like permanent death, I can say that both those things are also true so far in the new XCOM: Enemy Unknown. XCOM’s turn-based strategy elements are a lot of fun, but when you screw up or the tides of war turn against you, be prepared for a level of grief few games inspire.

In XCOM, you don’t play any particular soldier, but instead assume the role of Commander. This means that you don’t just decide who goes into battle against the alien onslaught, but have to build up the entire counter-invasion XCOM project. As humanity’s “first and last line of defense,” XCOM has to attempt to maintain security across the entirety of Earth, and as Commander you regularly have to make the hard choices.

This preview shows footage from the PC version, but the gameplay is similar on all platforms.

Choices like what direction to take the XCOM program. In between the times your forces are actively fighting, you’ll be biding your time by building up your base. Since your budget is based on the limited funds granted by XCOM’s member nations, as well as any alien tech that you sell in the “Grey Market,” you regularly find yourself strapped for cash. With numerous ways to spend your money and a limited budget, this means you simply won’t be able to build everything you need. For instance,I once found myself pressured to build an alien containment facility or construct new weapons and armor for my soldiers. The brave men and women who fight for me are the backbone of the XCOM project, but the alien containment project was needed so I could capture aliens alive, bolstering our options against them in the long term. Ultimately I chose the long term benefits over the additional armaments for my people, and when a rookie soldier died shortly thereafter, I knew I probably could have prevented that had I taken the other route.

Taking the long view over the lives of individual soldiers is especially difficult to do in XCOM since there’s permanent death. As a turn-based strategy game, you’ll regularly encounter moments in XCOM where you’ve done some move that puts your soldier in a dangerous place. Since you can’t undo that move, it’s up to you to try to use the rest of your remaining moves to try and salvage the situation. If you don’t manage to get that person to safety then they can easily be hit by enemy fire or ripped apart by terrifyingly deadly aliens in melee combat. You can always reload a previous save if you want to try and save that soldier again, but that does little to lessen the moment to moment tension caused by knowing that each misstep can cost you a soldier’s life. This tension grows exponentially as each soldier survives missions and levels up, since that means that their death not only harms the outcome of the mission, but denies you that soldier’s unique abilities for the rest of the game.

As silly as it might sound, the character customization tools actually increase the battlefield stress I feel as a result of permanent death. While you can’t currently change the nation a soldier comes from, you can select from a number of presets that change their race, face, hair, facial hair, and skin tone. You can also rename them, allowing you to create rough approximations of your friends (and in my case, the IGN staff). When taking XCOM-ified versions of my friends into battle and they got into a deadly situation, I sometimes found myself taking stupid risks to save them. My boss Charles Onyett missed a crucial shot in a mission, leaving him horrifically wounded and at the mercy of an alien. Just like I hope I might do in real life, I stupidly decided to rush my own Anthony Gallegos soldier to his rescue, killing the alien in the nick of time. Unfortunately, this also cost me both soldiers’ lives, as another alien used their positioning against them, easily killing both men with a single explosive. Was it the right decision to try and save Charles? Probably not, but it felt like the only choice I had when I wanted to keep both a friend and important warrior alive.

Even the act of choosing where to fight can be strenuous in XCOM. Each of the XCOM program’s allied nations will regularly be invaded by extra-terrestrials, and you’ll have to decide where to allocate your troops. It’d be easy enough if they were attacked one at a time, but more often you’ll have to pick between three or so invasions at once. This means choosing between who needs you the most, leaving the others to their own devices. The ensuing terror in the undefended countries raises their overall panic level, and if they end the month at full panic they’ll pull out of the program. If you lose eight nations, you lose the game. Of course, choosing where to allocate your soldiers is made easier when you’re simply trying not to lose, but earlier in the game it’s a challenge because the rewards for each nation’s missions are wildly different. Want an awesome sniper? Help out Australia. Need a bit of extra money to make it through the month? Better hop on over to Mexico and send some aliens to an early grave.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown doesn’t release for another month, and I’m starting to think that’s a good thing. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a lot of fun already, but I could use a bit of a break to lick my wounds and consider my choices before diving back in again. It’s a wonder that a game’s hard choices and inherent strenuous nature can simultaneously make it such a blast to play. Guess my friends’ stories weren’t all that far off about the franchise all those years ago.

Anthony Gallegos is an Editor on IGN's PC team. He enjoys scaring the crap out of himself with horror games and then releasing some steam in shooters like Blacklight and Tribes. You can follow him on Twitter and on IGN.